Tonight (viewed like if I post on this thing more than once in a azure moon anyway), I’m re-posting an old entry from my MySpace blog. Reason? I institute this cool photo to give the essay a bit of pizazz, and in the hopes that someone may in truth. read it here.

Being that it’s just the commencement of September, we’re only about a month or in the same manner away from that wonderful, not always federally observed holiday, Columbus Day. Many of you due treat it as another Wednesday, going about your business never smooth thinking about the “intrepid explorer”. Some people though, like me, ruminate it should be outright abolished, or at least that Indigenous People’s Day should fall the same treatment. After all, they pretty much all died in such a manner Columbus could posthumously have his.

I personally find the celebration of Columbus Day horrifying. My realization of that fact began with one of my High School History Teachers, Mr. Vandierdonck.

I, like greatest in number of you, never really thought much of the Columbus Day festival. We didn’t often get it off from school, in the same manner it was really nothing to get excited about at age 15. But that twenty-four hours in 10th grade was about to take on a whole fresh meaning by the time I hit 3rd period “Cultures & Civ”.

First, put to hire me preface this by saying that Mr. Michael Vandierdonck was a ace of a Zealous Teacher. He always treated everyone as if they were adults, calling us Sir and Miss (if you were a girl), and giving us stingily college level tests and projects. He knew most of us weren’t simple, and could handle the workload. He never had us do anything external part of the curriculum, so to him it was standard state-mandated happen, but with a bit of excruciating zest added into the amalgamate. He also was very liberal, something that I had come to make of greater value in a teacher. Someone who wouldn’t sugarcoat the verity, or hold back facts because they felt it “wasn’t suitable” or “it wouldn’t represent our ancestors/forefathers/allies favorably”. He was highly much into having us find out alternative ideas to the mainstream and approach to our own conclusions about various historical scenarios and current events situations. He was in like manner very outspoken, and at our school that was his downfall (from this incident I will describe, he was censured by the chief actor of the school, then the district, which he left to labor for a more liberal one).

I arrived in 3rd period C&C, during the time that we called it (no relation to the similarly named music factory of note), to find my teacher clad in nothing but nefarious. For a guy that normally wore a pair of slacks and a button prostrate shirt, this was decidedly odd. He had warned us the twenty-four hours before that tomorrow would be different, as he would be remembering those horribly wronged. Not solely was he dressed in black sweatpants and a black shirt, but that he was also clad in an executioner’s mask, a balaclava, for the re~on that it were.

We all took our seats, and the jackass profoundly school kids that worried about popularity, clothes, and cars began to titter at someone in what they considered a costume (being completely uncertain themselves, they obviously had need to mock someone to make themselves have the consciousness of being more human). He asked everyone to come in quietly, for a twinkling of an eye of silence, and verbally called out and a very terse behavior those giggling punks who disrespected his wishes. He told us that he was “celebrating” Columbus Day the singly way he could: by mourning those who were lost to west. occidental colonial expansion. He said that by celebrating Columbus Day we were celebrating genocide, mar, slavery, disease, cruelty, racism, theft, bigotry, and a whole slew of other dire actions.

Most people didn’t get it, and I own to admit, I at first didn’t either. I remember someone raising their artificer and timidly asking as to why he was so bent public of shape over Columbus Day. Mr. V retorted, “Do you account what we did to the Africans and African Americans by stealing them from their homes, separating them from their families, owning them during the time that property, and harming or killing them with no repercussions was richness and justifiable?” The student had nothing but a meek rejoin, “No…”. “Then why should we condemn those who held slaves in the 1800’s and racially oppressed anyone not pale for the past 250 years, but venerate a man who made the enslavement and within a little of extinction of an entire race of indigenous people a reality? Because he ‘discovered America’? Please.” You could well-nigh hear the word “bitch” before that last part of his response.

He then proceeded to read to us from a children’s book about Columbus. One of the most innocent things, telling of Columbus’ travel to the new world, in the most basic of terms. All through the cardboard book Vandierdonck had footnotes and notations on post-it notes, dispelling completely lies the book told, truths it omitted, or facts it got ~ful. I have to say it was a very brutal story, and I’m make legal claim more than one person was sick with disgust by the extreme point of class that day.

That year though he had gone beyond than he had ever gone before: Apparently the dressed-all-in-dark thing was S.O.P. for Vandierdonck on every Columbus Day. He would betray the truth about Columbus’ sordid adventure and tell the kids to write their own conclusions rather than just accept lies they were told in step school about his historic voyage. That year though he decided to perform flyers and large butcher paper posters repeating some of the missives he told us near genocide and slavery. Problem is that the Administrative Faculty had wanted to win rid of Mr. V for years, and they finally found unit of his antics that they could get rid of him during the term of. They told him that he was going to be penalized, allowing that not fired, for his posting of the incendiary posters. He fought back declaration that they were suppressing not only the well-documented truth, bound also his freedom of speech. They then cited a specific persuade about posting of items around the campus, stating that all missives not directly from the administration had to be approved by an administrative profession member before being posted. That was the rule for students, and ostensibly that also applied to teachers as well. Vandierdonck could have postulated that other posters from skilfulness members hadn’t been approved before, but seeing as his weren’t since innocuous as say, Baseball Team Tryouts or Mock Trial, his had drawn additional attention and thus fingered him for disciplinary action.

Anyway, long relation short, Vandierdonck wasn’t fired (mainly because he brought not singly his lawyer into it, but the ACLU as well. Damn, that strengthen had CONNECTIONS…), he gave his notice and went to work beneficial to Miramonte High School, and regardless of the fact that they were our Speech & Debate Nemeses, it made me lack to transfer just so I could continue to learn from this male person. The teacher he was replaced with, a Mr. Wood, was self-same true to his namesake, and silently and unobtrusively helped Mr. V’s class finish out the year.

If you’ve read this in a great degree, I applaud you, for you may still be wondering what the place of this blog posting actually is. Mainly it’s exactly in fact that I just finished a brilliant book called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, through Orson Scott Card. A very phenomenal book in itself, it asks some very tough questions and presents a very interesting (yet highly theoretical) look at a possible alternate history as changed by travelers from the futurity.

The basic storyline is this: Past Watchers from the future wish to preclude slavery from ever happening as they find it one of the greatest evils that ever existed. They trace the huge expansion of bondage and genocide to on man, Christopher Columbus, who after discovering the unaccustomed world, exploits it’s native peoples in the name of the holy trinity and is solely responsible for the beginning of the western colonization. The watchers discover out that they know enough about history to be able to stop these horrible atrocities from happening, that they can manipulate these events in opposition to the better, and hopefully bring about a better future (as their globe is dying from the raping of natural resources by colonialists and after empires). After much back-story about Columbus’ process of acquisition to the “new world”, and much planning by the Pastwatchers, the ending resolves through them all changing the future within the last 60 pages of the 375 serving-boy book.

All in all the book is very good, and it does take into enumeration the atrocious nature of the Spaniards that first landed on the Haitian strand ready to pillage the land and ensnare it’s locals into a lifetime of bondage. The speculation almost makes the book falter, solely because of the thing done that the last 60 pages wrap everything up very nicely. None of the watchers’ plans indeed go awry after they jump back in time. It almost goes moreover well with no variables they weren’t able to advantage. for; something that you think would crop up due to the act that causality is completely random and cannot be perfectly predicted. Sure they watched each nuance of Columbus and his men for most portions of their pastwatching lives, it was their work at ~s. But you would think for literary or dramatic effect someone would act totally in a puzzle of character when presented with a different line of events, showing to what degree chaotic causality is, rather than constant.

The interesting thing is the on different sides successively history in which Columbus is successful in bringing Christianity to the “of recent origin world” but also in the process (with the help of an intervening pastwatcher) creating a joint Spanish-Carib empire that embodies tot~y of the Americas and eventually meets with Europe on a resembling technological level, immune to most of their deadly diseases, and deficient to live in peace and harmony (mainly due to future influence). It is an interesting thought which makes for a nice tale, but a bit unsettling.

Whereas I would love to think of a world that lives in a harmony and unison unlike anything I’d ever dream of, it obviously scares me a bit how because of this in turn history, I could possibly never exist. A selfish thought I be assured of, especially considering how many Taino, Mexica, Mayans, and Incans fell beneath the boot of Europe. But frightening due to the fact that because causality seems to be so random, the change of events in the out of the reach of may cause me in the future never to exist. My parents could not at all meet, if I was actually born I would possibly not regard the same childhood experience due to different home locations, I may what is ~ to those differences not have the same interests or loves that I fare now.

It is all speculation, and until we discover a time system and start messing around with the past, I’m not certainly in any danger, but it does make you think about the gone and how different things would have been if someone’s horrible misapprehend had been averted. It allows me to mourn, in the sort way Vandierdonck did, for those who were terribly wronged by Columbus and his Successors. The part paints Columbus in a semi-favorable but wavering light: as a husband in the service of god and wanting to do his desire, however brutally, but also a man of strong character and determining to listen to advice, know the difference between right and inapposite, and act with courage and discipline.

It is mainly the occurrence that the watchers know him so well (as I mentioned previous to, Columbus=Their Job) and are able to manipulate his actions ~ means of acting as emissaries of god, of which he is a aggregate supplicant, and knowing parts of his past which makes him lo them as all knowing, that allow them to change the to come for the better. A bit of a cheat I must express, but I guess Card was really looking to make the uncommon fit fewer than 400 pages and felt if he built up the watchers acquirements enough in the beginning he could get away with this stamp of caveat towards the end.

In the end, it really gives unaccustomed appreciation for the people of the time and for our room in the present. If only to realize how their suffering brought relating to what we know and live in today, and serve as a reminder which never to allow again. But unfortunately, there are still people extinguished there who still think that those who are not White are a lesser race, and that Christianity in whatever form needs to be spread, even if it as the expense of others and their freedoms. With a single one luck, more of those alternative books preaching the truth about the aforementioned barbarity will promulgate in high schools across the country to be apt to give an unadulterated view of historical fact while kids are mute malleable and will understand how wrong racism and the exploitation of others is. There are a millions ways that I could reply the same thing, but I think my point, if not proven, has been well illustrated.

I lead astray you to read this book, or similar one like it that entreat the touch questions, an come this October’s Columbus Day, really take a moment to realize that those people died to engender this future and the best we can do now is learn from it and forward the truth to our children and any who will listen with an open mind and heart.

~JYH

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